Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “The small, leading sphere is, of course, the control room. The central sphere contains the accommodation—if you can call it such. The after sphere is the engine room.”

  Swinton said thoughtfully, “And I suppose that she’s manned—no, ‘inhabited’ would be a better word—by the descendants of her original crew and passengers. And they don’t know how to use the radio. Judging by all those antennae she’s not hard up for electronic gadgetry! And so they haven’t heard our signals, or if they have heard them they’ve not been able to answer. They probably don’t even know that we’re around.”

  Grimes laughed gently. “You haven’t quite got it right, Commander. She was on a long, long voyage—far longer than her designers anticipated!—but there was no breeding en route.”

  “But there’s life aboard her, sir. All those queer psionic signals that Mayhew’s been picking up . . .”

  “Yes. There is life aboard her. Of a sort.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t quite get you.”

  Grimes relented. “As I said, she’s a relic of the First Expansion. In those days, thanks to the failure of anybody, in spite of ample forewarning, to do anything about it, the Population Explosion had come to pass, and both Earth and the habitable planets and satellites of the Solar System were overcrowded. But it was known that practically every sun had its family of planets capable of supporting our kind of life. So there was a siphoning off of surplus population—mainly of those who could not and would not adapt to life in the densely populated cities. Techniques for the suspension of animation were already in existence and so each of the big ships was able to carry an enormous number of passengers, stacked like the frozen mutton in the holds. The crew too spent most of the voyage frozen, the idea being that the spacemen would keep watches—relatively short intervals of duty sandwiched between decades of deep freeze—so that they, on arrival at their destination, would have aged only a year or so. The passengers, of course, would not have aged at all.

  “Finally, with the ship in orbit about the planet of her destination, everybody would be revived and ferried down to the surface of their new home.”

  “I’m not sure that I’d care for that, sir.”

  “Neither should I. But they had no Interstellar Drive. And they didn’t know, Commander, as we now know, how many of those ships were to go missing. Some of them must have fallen into suns or crashed on planetary surfaces. Others are still wandering. . . .”

  “The Survey Service,” put in Sonya Verrill, “has satisfactorily accounted for all but thirteen of them.”

  “And this one brings the number down to twelve,” remarked the Commodore.

  “But how did she wander here?” demanded Sonya.

  “We can find out,” Swinton told her.

  “We can try to find out,” she corrected him.

  Grimes stared through the big binoculars at the archaic interstellar ship, carefully studied the forward sphere, the control compartment. He could make out what looked like a manually operated airlock door on its after surface. It should be easy enough, he thought, to effect an entrance.

  “Surely the duty watch will have seen the glare of our lights,” Swinton was saying.

  “I fear that the watch will have been too long for them,” said the Commodore quietly.

  As before, the boarding party was composed of Grimes, Sonya Verrill, Jones, Calhoun, McHenry and Dr. Todhunter. This time, thought Grimes, there would be something for the engineers and the Surgeon to do. The big ship could be restored to running order, her thousands of people rescued from a condition that was akin to death. And then? wondered Grimes. And then? But that bridge could be crossed when it was reached, not before.

  He led the way across the emptiness between the two vessels—the sleek, slim Faraway Quest and the clumsy assemblage of spheres and girders. He turned in his flight to watch the others—silver fireflies they were in the beam of the Quest’s lights, the exhausts of their reaction pistols feeble sparks in the all-pervading blackness. He turned again, with seconds to spare, and came in to a clumsy landing on the still-burnished surface of the control sphere, magnetized knee and elbow pads clicking into contact with the metal. He got carefully to his feet and watched the others coming in and then, when they had all joined him, moved slowly to one of the big ports and shone the beam of his helmet lantern through the transparency.

  He saw what looked like a typical enough control room of that period: acceleration chairs, radar and closed circuit TV screens, instrument consoles. But it was all dead, dead. There were no glowing pilot lights—white and red, green and amber—to present at least the illusion of life and warmth. There was a thick hoar frost that sparkled in the rays from the helmet lanterns; there was ice that gleamed in gelid reflection. The very atmosphere of the compartment had frozen.

  He made his way from port to port. It was obvious that the control room was deserted—but the control room occupied only a relatively small volume of the forward globe. The rest of it would be storerooms, and hydroponic tanks, and the living quarters for the duty watch.

  He said to Sonya, “We may find somebody in the accommodation. Somebody whom we can revive. And if we don’t—there are the thousands of dreamers in the main body of the ship. . . .”

  He led the way around the curvature of the metal sphere, found the door that he had observed from Faraway Quest. He stood back while McHenry and Calhoun went to work on it. They did not have to use any of their tools; after a few turns of the recessed wheel it opened easily enough, but the inner door of the airlock was stubborn. It was only after the little party had so disposed itself in the cramped compartment that maximum leverage could be exerted that it yielded, and then barely enough for the Commodore and his companions to squeeze through one by one. It was a thick drift of snow, of congealed atmosphere, that had obstructed the inward swinging valve. The snow and the frost were everywhere, and the ice was a cloudy glaze over all projections.

  They proceeded cautiously through the short alleyway, and then through a hydroponics chamber in which the ultraviolet and infra-red tubes had been cold for centuries, in which fronds and fruit and foliage still glowed with the colors of life but shattered at the merest touch. Grimes watched the explosion of glittering fragments about his inquisitive, gloved finger, and imagined that he could hear, very faintly, a crystalline tinkling. But there was no sound. The interior of the ship was frighteningly silent. There was not even the vibration of footsteps transmitted through metal plating and suit fabric; the omnipresent snow and ice muffled every contact.

  They came to a circular alleyway off which numbered doors opened.

  Grimes tried the first one, the one with the numeral 4. It slid aside with only a hint of protest. Beyond it was what had been a sleeping cabin. But it was not now. It was a morgue. It held two bodies. There was a big man, and he held in his right hand a knife, and the frozen film on it still glistened redly. There was a woman who was still beautiful. Todhunter’s specialized knowledge was not required to determine the cause of death. There was a clean stab wound under the woman’s left breast, and the man’s jugular vein had been neatly slit.

  They went into the next cabin. Its occupants, lying together in the wide bunk, could have been asleep—but in the clip on the bulkhead to which it had carefully returned was a drinking bulb. It was empty—but the label, upon which was a skull and crossbones in glaring scarlet, made it obvious what the contents had been.

  In the third cabin there was shared death too. There was an ingenious arrangement of wires leading from a lighting fixture to the double bunk, and a step-up transformer. The end might have been sudden, but it had not been painless. The two frozen bodies, entangled in the lethal webbing, made a Laocoon-like group of statuary—but that legendary priest of Apollo had perished with his sons, not with a woman.

  And in the fourth cabin there was only one body, a female one. She was sitting primly in the chair to which she was strapped, and she was clothed, attired in a black uniform that was stil
l neat, that did not reveal the round bullet hole over the breast until a close inspection had been made.

  “Cabin Number One . . .” said Calhoun slowly. “Could she have been the Captain?”

  “No,” said Grimes. “This, like the others, is a cabin for two people. And there’s no sign of a weapon. . . .” Gently he brushed a coating of frost from the woman’s sleeve. “Gold braid on a white velvet backing . . . She will have been the Purser.”

  They found the Captain in a large compartment that lay inboard from the alleyway. He, too, was formally clothed in gold-buttoned, gold-braided black. He was huddled over a desk. The automatic pistol was still in his hand, the muzzle of the weapon still in his mouth. Frost coated the exit wound at the back of his head, robbing it of its gruesomeness. Before him was a typewriter and beside the machine was a small stack of paper, held to the surface of the desk by a metal clip.

  Grimes read aloud the heading of the first page:

  “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN . . .

  “IF AND WHEN . . .

  “WHEN AND IF . . .

  “IF EVER.”

  It was gallows humor, and it was not very funny.

  Chapter 18

  “JUST POSSIBLY (Grimes read) somebody, somewhere, may stumble upon us. When we pushed off from Earth there was talk of an interstellar drive that would enable ships to take short cuts through sub-Space. I suppose that it’s sub-Space that we’re in now. But I don’t know how we got here, and I don’t know how we can get out. If I did know I would not have sanctioned the use of the Euthanol—and how was I to know that all but one of the containers had leaked?—and, in the case of the Gallaghers, the Nakamuras and ourselves, the rather messy substitutes. We could have finished our watch, of course, and then awakened Captain Mitchell and his staff so that they could have returned us to the state of suspended animation—but we talked it over and we decided against it. Our dreams, during our long sleep, our long watch below, would not have been happy ones. All the others are dreaming happily of the lives that they will lead on the new world to which we are bound, the lives of which their rationed vacations in Earth’s fast dwindling Nature Reserves were brief forecasts. But our dreams, now, would be full of anxiety, of cold and loneliness, of the black emptiness into which we have fallen.

  “But how?

  “How?

  “It’s the odd flotsam that we’ve sighted, from time to time, that has made up our minds. What laws of motion are valid in this Limbo we do not know. Perhaps there are no laws. But, appearing from nowhere, there was that corpse that orbited for some hours about the control sphere. It was that of a man. He was wearing archaic clothing: a gray top hat, a stock and cravat, a frock coat. Mary Gallagher, whose hobby is—was, I should say—history, said that his dress was that of the early Nineteenth Century. And then there was an aircraft, a flimsy affair of fabric and stays and struts. Centuries ago they must have fallen here—they and the other briefly glimpsed men and women, and a surface ship from the days of steam on Earth’s seas, and a clumsy looking rocket (not that we can talk!) bearing on its side characters that bore no resemblance to any Earthly alphabet.

  “But I feel that my time is running out. All the others are dead. Sarah asked me to dispose of her, giving as her reason her nervousness with firearms. But the others are dead. The Browns were lucky—when I dealt the cards she got the ace of spades, and with it the only intact bulb of Euthanol. The rest of us could have shared the pistol, but Nakamura preferred something more traditional (although, at the end, he didn’t use the knife in a traditional way) and Gallagher was an engineer to the end. But my time is running out. When I have finished this I shall shut down the machinery and then come back here to use the pistol on myself.

  “So here is the story—such as it is. If whoever finds it—and I feel that it will be some castaway like ourselves—can read it, it might be of value.

  “Fully manned, provisioned and equipped, with a full load of passengers, we broke away from orbit on January 3, 2005. (Full details will be found in the Log Books.) Once we were on the trajectory for Sirius XIV, watches were set. First Captain Mitchell, as senior officer, did the first year, so that he and his staff could make any necessary minor adjustments. The rest of us, after the period of preparation, went into the Deep Freeze. First Captain Mitchell was succeeded by Second Captain von Spiedel, and he was succeeded by Third Captain Geary. So it went on. It was a routine voyage, as much as any interstellar voyage is routine.

  “We relieved Captain Cleary and his people.

  “There was a period of three weeks, as measured by the chronometer, during which we were able to mingle socially with our predecessors, whilst Pamela Brown, in her capacity as Medical Officer, worked with Brian Kent, Cleary’s M.O., to restore us to full wakefulness and to prepare the others for their long sleep. And then, after Cleary and his team had been tucked away, we were able to get ourselves organized. The control room watches, of course, were no more than a sinecure. Routine observations were taken and told us that we were exactly on course and that our speed of advance was as predicted. The last observation, made at 1200 hours on the day that it happened, gave our position as 1.43754 Light Years out from Earth, and our velocity as 300 m.p.s. Full details are in the Log Book.

  “That night—we divided our time, of course, into twenty-four hour periods—all off-duty personnel were gathered in the wardroom. There was the usual rubber of bridge in progress, and the playmaster was providing light background music. Nakamura and Mary Gallagher were engaged in their habitual game of chess. Brown had the watch and his wife was keeping him company. It was typical, we all thought, of a quiet evening in Deep Space. Those of us who were on duty were keeping the machines running, those of us off duty were relaxing in our various ways.

  “So the sudden ringing of the alarm bells was especially shocking.

  “I was first in the control room, but only by a very short head. There was no need for Brown to tell us what was wrong; it was glaringly obvious. No, not glaringly obvious. It was the absence of glare, of light of any kind, that hit us like a blow. Outside the viewports there was only a featureless blackness.

  “We thought at first that we had run into a cloud of opaque dust or gas, but we soon realized that this hypothesis was untenable. Until the very moment of black-out, Brown told us, the stars ahead had been shining with their usual brilliance, as had been the stars all around the ship. Furthermore, one cannot proceed through a cloud of dust or gas, however tenuous, at a speed of 300 m.p.s. without an appreciable rise in skin temperature. An appreciable rise? By this time the shell plating would have been incandescent and all of us incincerated.

  “I’ll not bore you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) with a full account of all that we did, of all that we tried, of all the theories that we discussed. Brown stuck to his story. At one microsecond the viewports had framed the blazing hosts of Heaven, at the next there had been nothing there but the unrelieved blackness. We thought that we might be able to learn something from the radio, but it was dead, utterly dead. We disassembled every receiver and transmitter in the control sphere, checked every component, reassembled. And still the radio was dead. There were no longer the faint signals coming in from Earth and from other interstellar ships. There were no longer the signals emanating from those vast broadcasting stations that are the stars.

  “But there were no stars.

  “There are no stars any more.

  “And then, over the weeks, there were the—apparitions?

  “No. Not apparitions. They were real enough. Solid. Brown and Nakamura took one of the tenders out, and ran right alongside an ocean-going ship out of Earth’s past. Her name was Anglo-Australian, and on her funnel was a black swan on a yellow field. They were wearing their spacesuits, so they were able to board her. They found—but could it have been otherwise?—that all of her crew was dead. There were no entries in the Log Book to account for what had happened to her. As in our case, it must have been sudden.

  �
�There was the flotsam—the bodies, some clothed in the fashions of bygone centuries, some not clothed at all. The sea-going ships and the aircraft—and some of them could have come from Earth. There was the huge affair that consisted of a long fuselage slung under what must have been an elongated balloon—but the balloon had burst—with a crew of insects not unlike giant bees. There was that other construction—a relatively small hull suspended amid a complexity of huge sails. We never found out who or what had manned her; as soon as we turned our searchlights on her she vanished into the distance. A sailing ship of Deep Space she must have been—and we, unwittingly, provided the photon gale that drove her out of our ken.

  “And we worked.

  “But there was no starting point. We had fallen somehow into sub-Space—as had all those others—but how? How?

  “We worked, and then there were weeks of alcoholic, sexual debauch, a reaction from our days of wearisome, meaningless calculation and discussion. And when, sated, we returned to sobriety we were able to face the facts squarely. We were lost, and we did not possess the knowledge to find our way out of this desert of utter nothingness. We considered calling the other watches—and then, in the end, decided against it. They were happy in their sleep, with their dreams—but we, we knew, could never be happy. We knew too much—and too little—and our dreams would be long, long experiences of tortured anxiety. We could see no faintest gleam of hope.

  “And so we have taken the only way out.

  “But you, whoever you are (if there ever is anybody) will be able to help.

  “The other watches are sleeping in their own compartments in the northern hemisphere of the main globe. The waking process is entirely automatic. Give First Captain Mitchell my best wishes and my apologies, and tell him that I hope he understands.